She’s 350 Pounds and Olympics-Bound

When you’re a big, strong girl — a really big, strong girl — it’s easier to pull the table to your chair than to scoot your chair toward the table. Doorknobs need to be tightened, or you might pull them off. Holley Mangold, 22 and a superheavyweight Olympic weight lifter, is 5-foot-8 and weighs 350 pounds. When she squats, which she can do with 525 pounds on her shoulders, she looks almost wholly like an egg. “I get a lot of Creepy McCreepersons interested in me because I’m so big it’s not normal, it’s like a fetish,” she told me one day in the gym. “And I don’t like to sit outside. Not because I don’t like to be outside, but usually there are plastic chairs. Once you break a couple plastic chairs, you’re afraid of them all.”

Olympic weight lifting consists of two lifts: the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. The movements are more pole vault than bench press — Houdini-like feats of physics and grace. For the snatch, the lifter squats and stands explosively, accelerating the bar overhead, then drops back down into a squat. For the clean-and-jerk, the lifter squats, lifts the bar to the clavicle, then jumps into a lunge while thrusting the bar up. In March at the Olympic trials, held at the Arnold (as in Schwarzenegger) Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, Mangold snatched 110 kilos (242.5 pounds) and clean-and-jerked 145 kilos (319.7 pounds), placing just behind the other woman in her weight category selected for the Olympic team, Sarah Robles.

The snatch takes about four seconds. The clean-and-jerk takes about eight. To prepare for her short time on the platform in London, Mangold sleeps, plays Mario Kart 64, eats, ices her knees (arthritis from playing 12 years of football, including on her high-school team), moves hot boxes filled with ribs and pulled pork for her catering job at City Barbeque and trains with the Columbus Weightlifting Club.

The club is little more than a plywood platform and a few thousand pounds of iron at the back of the North Y.M.C.A. in Columbus. The whole sport of Olympic weight lifting in the United States is scruffy: no money, low participation; it’s our Jamaican bobsled team. By contrast, Holley’s brother Nick, who plays center for the New York Jets in the N.F.L., signed a contract extension worth $54 million over seven years. Holley won junior nationals at 18, after just three months in the sport, but she still needed to be prodded to train for the Olympics. Drew Dillon, her friend, lifting partner and now agent, told her: “What are you doing? You have a shot. Stop being an idiot.”

So in May 2010, Mangold dropped out of Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio, and eventually moved into the basement of Mark Cannella, the coach of the Columbus Weightlifting Club. Since then both her lifts and her accommodations have improved. Last fall, Dillon and his two roommates cleaned out their laundry room. Now Mangold sleeps beneath an old drying rack hung with weight-lifting medals and her enormous brassieres in a twin bed that her mother bought her for Christmas.

Photo

Holley Mangold trains for the Olympic Games at a Y.M.C.A. in Columbus, Ohio.Credit
Catherine Opie for The New York Times

“What do you think of my makeup, good or whorish?” Mangold asked Dillon one late afternoon this spring when they met at the Y to lift. Mangold was trying to perfect what she called her “professional makeup look” in advance of London. Dillon shrugged, exposing bulging traps.

Meanwhile, Mangold dangled from a chin-up bar to stretch her back. “I’d like to see the other 350-pound ladies try this,” she said.

Heather Smith, who is six feet tall and 295 pounds, soon arrived and declared Mangold’s makeup good. Smith was living in Columbus when a friend saw Mangold on an episode of “True Life” on MTV and told Smith that she had found Smith’s twin. “We’re so alike it’s creepy,” Smith said as Mangold taped her hands. “There aren’t many people who want to train this hard at something that’s not going to make them rich.”

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Not all lifters are big, but the women who compete in the 75-kilo-plus category tend to be huge. Mangold enjoys this. “I don’t want to be small,” she said. “That would be awful. Nobody remembers the skinny girl’s name.” Understandably, she would like to be known as an Athena, not a behemoth, so she makes a constant string of weight-lifting jokes. “Have you seen my beach ball? It’s about this big” — raises arms into a circle around her head, flexing her biceps — “and it went that way” — swivels right hand and left foot, flexing triceps and calf.

Given her size, Mangold wonders whether and where to get an Olympic tattoo.

“Tattoos on fat girls look — ”

“ — awesome,” a City Barbeque chef said to Mangold the next day as she loaded hot boxes into a van.

In London, Mangold does not expect to earn gold. No American weight lifters do. The women’s world record for the combined total in the snatch and clean-and-jerk is 326 kilos (719 pounds); Mangold’s personal record is 255 kilos (562.2 pounds). She’s just hoping for that feeling when the lift comes together, when her body goes down and the bar floats up. “It’s like peace, there’s no struggle,” Mangold said. “That’s what we’re all searching for, that feeling of weightlessness.”